Knife Fight and Other Struggles (16 page)

The worm, Allan had said when Robert asked what had done this to him. Not the worms, not the tent caterpillars, but a singular creature. He said he had been eaten by the worm.

Sharon’s free arm lashed at him again, but Robert wheeled back fast enough to avoid it. The arm cracked like a whip in empty air, boneless. His hand was going purple in her grip, but he pulled back anyway. With his free hand, he grabbed the insecticide from the night-table.

“You drew them here, didn’t you?” he asked.

She mumbled something—butterfly?—but her mouth had taken on an odd “O” shape, and the word mushed.

Robert hoisted the insecticide canister onto his hip, and pointed the nozzle at the bed. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, and the hand that she still held felt thick, numb. He moved his thumb over the nozzle.

“Allan warned me,” Robert said, and pressed the pin.

The mist spread before him. Her fingers unravelled from his wrist, and Robert stumbled backward under the force of his own weight. She reared out of her bed. She was naked under the covers, although her body was growing indistinct—her breasts, small to begin with, had shrunk to boyish proportions, and her hips had disappeared in the sinuous curl of her torso.

Robert shook the blood back into his hand then gripped the bottle two-handed. He felt the chemical as it settled on his bare scalp—certainly, he could remember that one of the cautions on the packaging was to
Avoid Contact With Open Wounds
. The manufacturers were right—it stung like battery acid where his scalp bled.

The effect on the thing in the bed was similar. The “O” of her mouth expanded like an iris, and her eyes glittered black. Her mouth made a sound like
stop
, but Robert kept spraying. She stretched back, her hands touching the wall behind her, and with a quick undulation, she was pressed entirely against the wall. Robert’s thumb slipped as he watched her crawl up the sheer surface, toward the ceiling, but he found it again and the spray resumed. He coughed and spat bloody phlegm onto the bedspread.

The creature hung over him, face to the ceiling, and Robert lifted the canister over his head. The chemical rained down on him, and the mist grew, and his hands became numb, and by quick degree the room darkened.

Sharon’s hands slipped from the ceiling then, and for a moment she dangled by her knees alone. At first he thought she was going to fall—a great worm, dying in the spray.

But she surprised him. Her arms flew forward, and in a single motion knocked the insecticide from his grasp and wrapped around his chest. She descended, round mouth wide, as the darkness finally overtook him.

Robert woke in blackness. He was on the bed—he felt the comforter, the pillow beneath his bare scalp. But the room was utterly dark, more so than he had ever experienced. Hand trembling, he reached for the lamp. He found the switch, but when he pressed it, the darkness remained. He pulled his hand back quickly. The pain of that simple movement was excruciating; his fingernails were gone, and the raw nerves underneath howled. The skin of his arm felt like it had been scraped along asphalt. He opened his mouth, and when he spoke his voice sounded like an old man’s.

“Hello?”

The house was silent—even the sound of the caterpillars was absent. Robert repeated: “Hello? Who’s there?” but got no better results.

He was alone.

He chuckled at the thought. Lynn, and Mary, and Laura, and now Sharon—they’d all taken what they needed. The chuckle turned into a snorting guffaw. They’d all stripped him bare, left him in his cabin, on his land. Here where his roots were.

Robert got himself under control and tried to sit up in bed. The effort it took was Herculean, and he had to sit for a minute after that to get his wind back. Lynn had gone back to the city, Mary had gone back to the States, and Laura . . . she had just gone. Where would Sharon go? Where would she fly?

Gingerly, Robert lowered his feet to the floor. He sat there for some time in his new, silent night, straining to hear the beating of her wings.

Not many outside the confines of the political wing at City Hall would guess it, but our new mayor is an expert with a knife.

He has been practising since he was a boy—from the day he first laid eyes on the eleven-inch bowie knife jammed hilt-deep into a tree stump in the family’s ancestral woodlot, and withdrew it, claiming it as his own then and forever.

The concrete of his father’s basement workshop floor is still flecked with tiny, reddish-brown dots, a Jackson Pollock record of the young mayor’s apprenticeship, those nights when he was too slow, or worse . . . too quick. Those days are long past, and now the mayor is neither. He is merely bold. He is an expert.

Since the hour of his swearing-in, the mayor has kept the knife in the desk drawer next to his chain of office, wrapped in an oilcloth tied with thin leather straps. There it slumbers, six nights a week. The seventh—Thursday—the mayor carefully unwraps it, holds it to the fading afternoon light to see that its edge remains keen and, in the company of his older cousin—the one who oversees road repairs in the west district—the mayor steps into the elevator that takes him straight to the parking garage.

And so it begins.

In the beginning, the waiting crowd had been small indeed—comprised of a handful of senior staff and five city councillors, each hoping to become the mayor’s deputy and thereby enjoy the attendant perquisites and honours. They had been there since three p.m., stripped to the waist and greased with goose fat, not daring to speak, barely breathing. The mayor’s cousin had reviewed the rules with each of them, which he called “Robert’s Rules of Knife Fight.” It is said that the city clerk, leaning against the planning commissioner’s SUV, snickered at the procedure, and that this—not political differences—was the reason for her dismissal at the next meeting of council.

The mayor’s cousin explained the rules then, as he has at each subsequent Thursday.

1. There are only ever two combatants in a knife fight, and each combatant is allowed a knife.

2. The knives are to be provided by the combatants, in a keen, clean condition free of rust. Other objects—scissors, hammers, axes, surgical instruments—shall not be considered knives for the purposes of the knife fight.

3. Combatants shall arrive stripped to the waist, and well-lubricated so as to keep the knife fight from becoming a wrestling match, which is unseemly.

4. Goose fat is considered an acceptable lubricant for the purposes of a knife fight.

5. Victory in the knife fight is usually decided by the drawing of first blood.

6. Combatants shall avoid their opponents’ faces, hands, and throats, confining their strikes to parts of the body usually covered by appropriate business attire.

7. In the event that both combatants draw blood from one another in the same instant, the knife fight shall be considered a draw and entered into the Records as such.

8. To the victor go the spoils.

The knife fight remained a well-kept secret for many months. It is true, we wondered at the selection of the new deputy mayor—a stocky, dull-witted rookie councillor from the slaughterhouse district who was unable to finish a sentence without uttering a profanity and crumpled his briefing notes without reading them. And more than once we had seen a blossom of red erupt on the white blouses that the new budget chief wore to the committee meetings regarding capital allocations for the coming fiscal year. And we had wondered at the propensity of the new chair of the Transit Commission to press a fist to his mouth and shut his eyes during breaks in meetings—as though holding back tears at some awful recollection.

But who cared about such things in the larger scheme? Not us, not at first.

The first year of the mayor’s first term was successful by any account. The budget chief not only balanced the books but was able to deliver a modest property tax reduction for the elderly and lay down plans for a swimming pool and target range, creating the first two-thirds of a much-needed triathlete program in the underprivileged slums lining the west riverbank. Our editors wrote supportive editorials as the deputy mayor announced that the Association of Suburban Golf Courses would open up in the winter months, for the final third. The new light rail line servicing the old, blue-collar municipality of Smelt received all the funding it needed from a new federal grant program, announced by the Transit Commission chair in tremulous tones.

So we filled our newspapers and broadcasts and blogs with triumphant stories of the mayor’s success. We remained silent on the price that his council seemed to be paying for that success. Perhaps we intuited the truth: getting too close to the story might mean crawling too close to an edge.

A knife edge.

Tabloid reporter Stan Bollixer broke the story. Nobody should have been surprised, yet we all were. For few outside the jungles of El Salvador knew it at the time . . . but Stan also was an expert with a knife.

The carbon-steel butterfly knife Stan keeps in the pocket of his jeans has been with him nearly as long as the mayor has possessed his bowie knife. But Stan was a grown man when he first wielded his blade; when we asked him later why he kept it so close, he would say only that it had saved his life enough times that he owed it a good home.

No doubt: Stan was an old hand, with sound instincts. He’d come to City Hall during the election and had watched our mayor from the start of the campaign. In the newsroom, he’d predicted that the mayor would prevail, even when the polls placed him a distant fourth. Stan recognized something in the man’s eye, in the way he handled metaphor in his speech . . . in the way he moved.

He recognized a predator, and he recognized prey.

So Stan went to work on the mayor, the way a reporter does. He started asking around with his police contacts and located an arrest report from twenty years earlier, when the candidate, then just a lad, was caught knocking over tombstones in the nearby town of Reamington. The story made the front page and sent the future mayor’s campaign into a flurry of damage control that proved unnecessary: for who among us has not, in the naïveté of youth, mocked death with a well-placed boot and a war cry?

Stan pressed on. The mayor was but a lowly school trustee prior to his ascendency. Stan dug up the mayor’s voting record and discovered he had voted to ban several well-regarded texts from public school libraries, that he had voted for his own salary increase—not once, but three times. Stan discovered a formal complaint, alleging that the mayor had arrived inebriated and used salty language during a Parent-Teacher Association meeting to discuss the refurbishment of playground equipment.

None of it stuck. With each article, the mayor’s public approval rose. The campaign stopped even responding to Stan’s reportage, and the week before the election the campaign manager sent Stan a thank-you note on gilt-edged, embossed stationary that seemed very expensive, in gratitude for all his support. Stan wrote another story based on the note, questioning whether the mayor was operating within campaign spending guidelines, given the opulence of the gesture. Three days later, the mayor was elected.

Thus did Stan’s permanent assignment to the press gallery at City Hall become an inevitability.

We liked Stan very much from the start. He was soft-spoken in scrums, but attentive. When he did ask a question, it would be the question that pierced the heart of the matter. When he filed his story, it would be the one that, if we were all to be honest, best described the nuance of the issue at hand.

When he watched something, before too long, he saw what it was about.

So it was that on the Tuesday after the announcement of the new light rail line to Smelt, he requested a personal, one-on-one interview with the mayor. No one thought he’d receive it. Our mayor, as everyone well knows by now, is not a friend of the media. He prefers to speak to constituents directly, over the public address system on the subway or via skywritten aphorisms—or in person, descending upon the backyard barbecues, garage sales, and weddings of leading citizens for impromptu moments of bonhomie. He does not grant many interviews.

But he made an exception for Stan. The interview was scheduled for 12:05 p.m. and expected to last fifteen minutes. The subject was to be a retrospective of the mayor’s first hundred days in office. The Mayor’s Office was suspicious, for they had a sense that Stan was up to something. So the mayor didn’t face Stan alone; his second-floor office was crowded with his press secretary, his deputy mayor, and his cousin in the Transportation Department, who had taken a lunch break from road repair to see what Stan Bollixer truly wanted.

Stan was not dissuaded. He smiled, sat down across the desk from the mayor, and reached into his pocket, as if to produce a digital voice recorder.

There was no recorder.

“This can be off the record,” he said, as he flipped open his butterfly knife, turned it so it gleamed in the noonday light, and with a sudden, savage plunge drove its point deep into the mahogany top of the mayor’s desk.

Tuesday comes but two days before Thursday, and there was much to be done. The mayor’s chief of staff and communications director tried to talk the mayor out of it, but he was determined. So they set about devising political strategies, anticipating the worst possible outcomes. The mayor’s cousin attempted to arrange to have coffee with Stan to see if he might be dissuaded, but Stan refused even to take his calls. Stan meanwhile whispered, to those few of us he’d come to trust, about the thing that he had begun. He spent time in his office, honing his blade with a whetted stone and recalling, again and again, the night in San Salvador—August, hot as a sauna, smelling strangely of cinnamon—when the one-eyed man from the jungle had appeared at his room and tried to kill him.

One thing he did not do was inform his editor. Neither did any of us.

Our mayor is a man of chiselled granite. This is not apparent when he appears in public, bedecked in his checkered blazers and generously cut trousers, the novelty ties that light up with strategically placed LEDs. Were his constituents to see him shirtless, the goose fat sliding down his torso in thick rivulets, highlighting tendons and veins and ropey, hard-won scars, they would not recognize him—and, worse, they would no longer recognize themselves. They might recoil, as we did, seeing him step off the elevator in the parking garage reserved for city councillors and senior staff, watching him meet each of our eyes in turn with his hard and fearsome stare.